Interbike Exhibition Day 3 Overview

While the show floor may have closed here at Interbike, my coverage hasn’t quite ended. I still have numerous posts to write, edit and publish – which will keep on trickling out over the next few days. Still in the hopper are posts covering the following:

Now that I type that all out, holy cow I still have a lot to write! So with that in mind…let’s talk about where I wandered Friday.

On the last day of the show – things get quiet pretty quick. While the below picture was taken mid-morning…it was fairly sparse throughout most of the day.

I didn’t have a chance to mention it earlier in the week, but when it comes to display booths at Interbike, the mountain bike guys get all the props for much cooler booths than everyone else.

Though, one surefire way to increase your cool factor is to install some form of LCD/Flat Screen display and let people interact with it. In this case, the TACX booth – which I spent a fair bit of time in. Look for my write-up on that experience shortly.

While the Avia booth didn’t have any trees in it – it did have a bike magically hanging from the ceiling – so they get props for that. In the picture below it may look like it’s resting on something…but nope – just levitating with the assistance of some wires.

Speaking of Wahoo – I spent a bit of time with Ransom, who develops iMobile Intervals. I’ve been playing with this quite a bit lately, as it allows me to actually stream in real-time my ANT+ data over the internet via my iPhone, along with location data…and even do so on my own page.

After chatting with Ransom, I went about 20 feet to my left and talked to the folks from Tunebug. They’ve created a helmet speaker that’s both safe…and functional. It clips on top of your helmet and still allows you to hear all the cars/noise/etc… around you without any problem – while also giving you some tunes. It connects via Bluetooth, which is pretty sweet. They gave me some demo product to try out, so I’ll report back and let ya’ll know how it works out.

Speaking of integration – I had a good chat with the folks from 4iiii (pronounced Four-eye) about their new Heads Up Display ANT+ system. These glasses for $149 will display your ANT+ data (including power, heart rate, cadence and speed) on the bottom rim of your glasses. It uses a multi-colored LED system and integrates with Training Peaks. It bases it on predefined workouts and zones that you download to the glasses using micro-USB.

The goal of the product is to keep you from looking down at your bike computer and crashing (the guy I talked to was actually an Ironman athlete himself) – thus allowing you to see the LED lights in your peripheral vision. They noted that while at first they looked into actual LED digits (i.e. displaying 22MPH), but that required a refocusing of your eye from far to near, and thus didn’t really make it any safer. Whereas the lights don’t require any eye refocusing. You just tap the side of the glasses if you want to show a different metric, and it’ll audibly tell you as well.

I’ll have more on them later this week, as I’ll be meeting up with them up in Calgary on Wednesday at the ANT+ Symposium.

Onto something different…again I point out that anything related to mountain bikes is just cooler. In this case, this bike mount system for cars from Sea Sucker doesn’t require any pain in the butt components – just vacuum mounts straight to your car wherever you want.

I also had a chance to swing by SRM’s booth…mostly just to look at their really expensive power meters…well, that and their pretty colorful PCVII displays.

Of the triathlon company’s who were there, De Soto takes the cake for coolest booth sign.

…though Knog takes the cake for just flat out weirdest. I think they were going for the Beijing Olympic Water Cube look.

And last but not least…when all else fails with your bike, you can just make a flower pot holder out of it.

5 Easy Steps To The Site

You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.

It turns out I’ve written a fair bit of stuff over the past few years – and after it disappears from my front page, a lot of it never really sees the light of day again without Google’ing skillz. Or a photographic memory…which I don’t have. I’ve taken a look back and found stuff that…continues to find a trickle of readers via web searches or forum links.

I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.